Listings

The LHSA
Landscape Listings

The idea of cataloguing, categorising, awarding and encouraging the development of our Landscape Heritage, natural, cultural and/or designed-desirable goes hand-in-glove with an inventory and listing of our Landscape Heritage, of the Landscape Estate. As The Landscape Map demonstrates already, there are many categories of Landscape, at least ten Layers of Landscape in maybe three broad domains/types.

Where exactly this is going to take us I am not certain yet, but hopefully the concept will grow and develop with time. So far we don't have any systems of Landscape Classification or Categorisation or Assessment of any kind beyond, perhaps, the municipal level. I believe the City of Cape Town has such a system but there is no cohesive provincial, national or regional system; yet many of our landscapes straddle boundaries of every kind.

Landscapes are classified to some extent in geographic and environmental studies, and very well so. This is a good basis for understanding and tackling the Natural Landscape. But beyond this, when you get onto the more subtle and complex spectres of the visual, aesthetic and kinetic landscape, the realm of perceptions, the Cultural Landscape and the Designed-Desirable Landscape leaves much to be desired.

There actually is a point to knowing where, what and how all our Landscapes are, be they parks and gardens, commercial and historic landscapes, resorts and resources all relying on Landscape. Once you have this information mapped, statistics and statuses can be studied and determined.

There is a huge amount of work to do in this arena and it covers both mapped sites such as a park or garden, as well as regions like the Overberg, Karoo or Coast. Tying together all these landscape resources through region and place recognition will ultimately help people, public and planners alike, know where their particular Landscape fits in. For this work we need financing and support.

What we need is a John Platter's Guide to the Landscape and it's going to be the LHSA Landscape Listings. There will come a day when our listing is much sought after, to be celebrated, quaffed and acquired. Celebrated landscape designs such as those in the coveted biannual ILASA Awards should also be included here.